Paul Wong, Managing Director of Bosch Security Systems, speaks ahead of IFSEC to Professional Security Magazine MD Roy Cooper. A theme of the show for the manufacturer will be HD – at lower bandwidth with greater images in low light conditions.
Roy Cooper: What do you hope to do at IFSEC?
Paul Wong: This year we have gone for a slightly different tack. We have a concept design stand, which is to mimic our products; and it’s more about a customer experience than the products themselves. The idea is that we take the customer on a journey through the concept and the benefits of each technology. So it will be a walk-through. I don’t want to give too much away; but I think people will look at it and think it’s unique.
RC: You are focusing as I understand it on HD?
PW: HD specifically and the technology impacting on bandwidth, and low light capabilities – the higher the bit rate, the greater the bandwidth, and the challenges; and what we are doing is showing how we address this – to the point where we are achieving better rates than a less demanding analogue system or Mpeg system. So we are showing customers how they can realise the benefits of HD but without the bandwidth and storage concerns.
The technology enabling this bandwidth reduction is our CBIT technology (ContentBased Imaging Technology). We are effectively using our IVA (Inteligent Video Analytics) to optimise the video, but we are recording a clean image, which enables us to get the bandwidth down and save the customer infrastructure costs, and the cost of storage. The analytics are taking all the noise out of the image, any unwanted video, without degradation to the image itself. And it’s only transmitting from the camera the important bits. You get less demanding data rates. I would say it’s a technology ground-breaker. The real benefit is HD quality with its benefits without the additional costs.
Bosch is using its own analytics capability; because we design our own analytics and have done so for close on ten years now. We have over 100 software engineers at work on analytics alone; not just for our [security] division. It’s video-based analytics; the same technology is used for early warning systems in some well-known brands of cars where there’s an on-board camera and the analytics ensures the driver is made aware of potential safety issues. It is that same technology now being utilised to take all the unwanted noise and data that isn’t required in a scene. In most cases, especially if you have harsh or difficult lighting conditions, you will get noisy images and all that noise turns into data and you are transmitting all that data over your network and so it slows things right down; or you need to put greater infrastructure in to compensateIn addition you will have to adopt greater storage capacity to record this noise which increases costs.
Starlight cameras are the first with this technology inherent in the product. Trying to fit more pixels on a chip means pixels are smaller and cannot capture as much light. Hence, normal HD cameras find it very difficult to see in the dark, and what people will find with our latest technology adopted in our Starlight cameras, is that we achieve better low light performance than even our analogue [Bosch] Dinion cameras.
Alongside this we have our new transcoding technology which allows remote viewing of HD video from virtually anywhere no matter how poor the network is. Transcoding technology allows us to vary the output based on the bandwidth available to the system, or user at any time, whether over a mobile network or a PTSN network. The system adapts to give the best usable moving image given the conditions. But customers don’t lose the HD quality because as soon as the user pauses the video the full HD still image is provided, and of course your local storage will be recording in full HD. So this is another technology that will allow customers to realize the benefits of HD where previously the network infrastructure may have been an issue.
RC: Can you tell me about your partner programme?
PW: Integration partner programme, IPP. The company has employed a lot of resource in the last couple of years into opening our platform. As you know, we were one of the founder members of ONVIF [onvif.org] – that was the start of this open mind-set, to allow people access to our products and protocols. This is an extension of that philosophy; we want to be completely open protocol. Our plan is to integrate with key third party manufacturers; and we have already worked with partners up to now such as Genetec, Lenel and Milestone Systems to name a few; more names will be announced in due course. Thus, end users who choose to buy Bosch products are not locked into us and have the ability to pick and choose other manufacturers in future minimising the loss of the initial investment.
